Resultados

1. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, First Vintage International Ed.

(New York: Vintage, 1993), 15.

2. Ibid., 16.

3. Ibid., 17.

4. Ibid., 28.

5. Ibid., 28.

6. Ibid., 15.

7. I loosely consider each of these concerns throughout the book. I only name them here for the purpose of introducing them into the milieu of Baldwin’s religious experience. In this chapter, I establish Baldwin’s definition of religion as a fundamental resource for understanding not only religion but also the theological, sociological/ racial, sexual, and gendered meanings derived from and supported by (black) lib-eration theology.

8. Stanley Macebuh, James Baldwin: A Critical Study (New York: The Third Press, 1973), 50.

9. James Hoopes says, according to Charles Peirce “the meaning of every thought is established by triadic relation, an interpretation of thought as a sign of a determining object. I am applying this concept as a queer semiotic configuration that speaks to the intricate web of psychological complexes, which makes up Baldwin’s understand-ing of black religion, which I say more about later in this chapter.

Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 9.

10. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), 16.

11. Ibid., 16.

12. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), 47.

13. Argument is defined here as “any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief.” Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” in Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Reading & Interpretive Essays, ed. John J. Stuhr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 127.

14. Michael F. Lynch, “Just Above My Head: James Baldwin’s Quest for Belief,” Literature & Theology 11 (3, 1997): 284.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 285.

17. Ibid., 287.

18. Ibid., 293.

19. Clarence E. Hardy, III, James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 11.

20. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), 24.

Notes 155 21. Ibid., 24.

22. Ibid., 22.

23. Ibid., 23.

24. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1962), 16.

25. Williams James’s idea of a genuine option is “when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.” Baldwin understands the “option”

available to him. This option is “living” because it is taken seriously;

it is “forced” because it is a choice he cannot escape by deciding not to choose; and it is momentous because the stakes are impor-tant and the choice irreversible. Finally, it is quite evident Baldwin relies on his “passional” nature because the choice of which “gim-mick” cannot be decided on intellectual grounds alone. “The Will to Believe,” Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Reading & Interpretive Essays, ed. John J. Stuhr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 230.

26. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1962), 24.

27. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1962), 27.

28. Ibid., 27.

29. Ibid., xii.

30. Stanley Macebuh, James Baldwin: A Critical Study, 50.

31. Emma Goldman’s critique of puritanism is similar to that of Baldwin’s in that they both share European understanding of American Christianity as puritanical. Goldman says puritanism “has fought the flesh as something evil; it had to be subdued and hidden at all costs,” in “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism,” Anarchism and Other Essays. Second Revised Ed. (New York & London: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911), 108.

32. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), xi.

33. Ibid., xi.

34. Ibid., xi.

35. Ibid., xi.

36. Marlon B. Ross says the “rock is the author’s inheritance, one that is both a strength, enabling identity and survival, and a stumbling block, obstructing the way toward uninterrupted human desire by giving the individual a secure place to hide from the nakedness of desire (i.e., an identity).” In a similar way, I am identifying the rock as a source of puritanical inheritance—the stumbling block—of black people seeking security and safety. See Marlon B. Ross, “White Fantasies of Desire: Baldwin and the Racial Identities of Sexuality,”

in James Baldwin Now, ed. Dwight McBride (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 29.

37. Ibid., 28–29.

38. Ibid., 28–29.

39. I am referring here in part to Charles Long’s claim that studies of reli-gion do not give “adequate explanation” to the “practical-existential activity of religious communities.” Studying Baldwin’s religious inher-itance is a method for overcoming the inadequacies. “Prolegomenon to a Religious Hermeneutic,” Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO:

The Davies Group Publishers, 1999), 31.

40. Ibid., 31.

41. James Baldwin, “Nothing Personal” James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1998), 693.

42. Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, 92.

43. Studs Terkel Interview 1961, in Conversations with James Baldwin, eds Fred L. Stanley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 8.

44. Ibid., 8.

45. Stanley Macebuh, James Baldwin: A Critical Study, 34.

46. Ibid., 35.

47. The lack of an account of the influence of Puritanism leads to a misreading of black religion. This is an oversight of black theology, which led to the omission of issues of sex, gender, and class. This also has led to Womanist and now my queer semiotic amending of black theology. I will say more about this later.

48. Ibid., 5. I am making a correlation between the observation between Du Bois idea of double- consciousness, which is “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of another…” and Baldwin’s idea of “psychological warfare” relative to the Negro problem.

However, the comparison ends there, at least with regards to the dif-ferent approaches to rectifying the condition of black people and the role of religion in that process. See also, W. E. B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Random House, 1996), 5.

49. Sydney E. Ahlstrom uses the term “Puritan Spectrum” as a means of identifying a collection of denominational components—Bap-tists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists—or “Anglicanism that is “deeply colored by Puritan convictions” which shaped the

“early religious life” of Virginia and the other American colonies.

I am expanding the spectrum to include the social, economic, and

Notes 157 political influences of Puritanism in the conquest of America and the subjection of black bodies as a part of that as well. See Sydney E.

Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1972), 132–134.

50. Studs Terkel Interview 1961, in Conversations with James Baldwin., 5.

51. Ibid., 5.

52. Charles Long, Significations., 3.

53. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 124–125.

54. Charles Long, Significations., 163.

55. Studs Terkel Interview 1961, in Conversations With James Baldwin., 4.

56. Charles Long, Significations., 163.

57. Dr. Martin Luther, Jr, speaking about how “… Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of ‘somebodiness’ that they have adjusted to segregation…” The word captures the dichotomy and dilemma of the oppressed. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr, ed. James Melvin Washington (New York:

HarperCollins, 1986), 296.

58. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1962), 29.

59. Ibid., 31.

60. Baldwin agrees with Terkel’s assessment that the psychological haz-ard or collision occurs when the rich heritage of black people meets with the accepted stereotype given to black people by whites. The resulting shame leads to “a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.” James Baldwin, Studs Terkel Interview 1961, in Conversations With James Baldwin, eds Fred L. Stanley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 5.

61. I make the case that the concept of the perpetual unsafe nature of blackness reflects the idea of the “perpetually disobedient black”

that is an outgrowth of the conflation of blackness with disobedi-ence fostered by Christian absolutism supporting the Anglican doc-trine of absolute obedience for slaves in the American colonies. In becoming perpetually dangerous black people are forced into a posi-tion of never being able to find safety as a matter of choice. See Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), 146.

62. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1962), 30.

63. Stanley Macebuh, James Baldwin: A Critical Study, 31.

64. Ibid., 29.

65. Ibid., 31 66. Ibid., 31.

67. Ibid., 31.

68. Stanley Macebuh, James Baldwin: A Critical Study, 30.

69. See Joseph R. Washington, Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 163.

70. Jon Butler argues that we should “attach less importance to Puritanism as the major force in shaping religion in America.” “For Baldwin, however, Puritanism’s power in shaping American religion—both black and white—has no parallel. Puritanism remains the single most dominant force shaping the whole spectrum of black religion and black bodies in American democracy. This is what shapes that history from a hermeneutical (hermeneutic of queer semiotics) per-spective. See Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, 2.

71. Charles Long, “Primitive/Civilized: The Locus of a Problem,”

Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 1999), 90.

72. Ibid., 90.

73. Stanley Macebuh, James Baldwin: A Critical Study, 29.

74. Laurel C. Schneider, Re-Imagining the Divine: Confronting the Backlash Against Feminist Theology (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1999), 23.

75. Ibid., 162.

76. Studs Terkel Interview 1961, in Conversations With James Baldwin, eds Fred L. Stanley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 5.

77. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1962), 33.

78. Ibid., 40–41.

79. Ibid., 46–47.

80. Ibid., 47.

81. Ibid., 47.

82. Joseph R. Washington, Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States, 169.

83. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1962), 25.

84. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”, in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.), 21.

85. Marousis-Bush citing the work Walter Benjamin in Bainard Cowan’s article, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory.” New German

Notes 159

Critique, No. 22, Special Issue on Modernism, Winter 1981: p.

109–122, Jeremy Marousis-Bush “Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative as Joban Allegory”, http://www.associatedcontent.com/, 1/8/2010, 2.

86. Ibid., 2.

87. Interestingly Michael F. Lynch sees Baldwin’s “fundamentally Christian” Harlem experience as defining his perspective. However, for Lynch it is not allegorical but dialecticism that is the outcome.

Michael F. Lynch, “Just Above My Head: James Baldwin’s Quest for Belief,” Literature & Theology 11 (3, 1997): 285.

88. Marousis-Bush is using Joban allegory to explain Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. According to Marousis-Bush, Rowlandson was a

“devout Puritan” who “made metaphorical connections between her current life events and biblical texts … setting the tone of the work.”

Ibid., 1.

89. Ibid., 1.

90. Ibid., 2.

91. Ibid., 4.

92. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A biography (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1994), 384.

93. Conceit is defined as an extended or elaborate metaphor most associ-ated with poetics: the science of literature, which looks at how lan-guage is put together. It is also a means of suspending belief. In this case, conceit as a poetic heuristic device helps to complicate the use of allegory to show it as a tool for radicalizing discourse, suspending belief for the purposes of creating new meaning, while at the same showing the roots for old understanding. For a more conventional application of poetics see, Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Second Ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 59.

94. As a hermeneutical endeavor, historical consciousness, the awareness of change over the course of human history, is a means by which I can at least locate Puritanism as an interpretive modality, which is hidden by the subjective nature of the history that it has created, but remains hidden as the source of the prejudice to which black people are subject.

95. Eddie S. Glaude Jr, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 68.

96. James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.), 163.

97. Ibid., 163.

98. An interesting insight (offered by Dr. Ted Jennings) is that Baldwin’s critique of an invented African-ness that seeks to by-pass the

“American-ness” of the black experience recalls what he says about Negro being only an American invention and that an invented

“African-ness” seeks to “by-pass the ‘American-ness’ of the black experience.” What Baldwin is saying here is quite the opposite. For Baldwin, the issue is that the white world does not want to accept the fact the black experience is an authentic American experience. The desire of black people to manufacture African-ness is in response to the white resistance faced when claiming their American-ness, because it challenges the idea of innocence of white identity.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1962), 81.

99. Stanley Macebuh, James Baldwin: A Critical Study, 50.

100. Ibid., 36.

101. Ibid., 162.

102. Ibid., 154.